This was January 2000, inside Walsh Gymnasium, the cozy headquarters of Seton Hall’s basketball program that still looked like a place where Jimmy Chitwood might have knocked down a few jumpers back in the day. Tommy Amaker, sitting on a wood row of bleachers, was describing a vision he couldn’t quite shake.

“You look at what we’re trying to do here, what St. John’s is trying to do, you can’t help but be excited about what that rivalry could mean to both schools, both states,” Amaker said. “Think about it: 20,000 people at the Garden, 20,000 people at the Meadowlands, the two of us fighting every year for supremacy not only in this area, but in the Big East. And maybe beyond, too. We’re not that far away from that.”

Ten years ago, that crazy apparition wasn’t so crazy. St. John’s would win 25 games and earn a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament in Mike Jarvis’ second year, a time when Jarvis still was seen as some kind of basketball mystic on Utopia Parkway. Seton Hall did even better, winning two of its 22 games in the NCAAs, coming within three points of the Elite Eight, all in a season when it had signed up the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class for the next year.

“I know what a rivalry feels like,” said Amaker, a veteran of the Carolina-Duke wars. “And this could be that kind of special.”

Ten years later, Seton Hall lies in ruins, St. John’s in shambles, a couple of charter Big East programs who fired their coaches this week for wildly different reasons. Seton Hall grew tired of Bobby Gonzalez’s behavioral issues, and St. John’s grew weary waiting for Norm Roberts’ coaching acumen to catch up to his integrity.

In essence, Seton Hall jettisoned a winning coach because it covets someone who, personality-wise at least, better resembles the man St. John’s just let go. And St. John’s now wants someone who can inject instant life and energy into its program. For years, there were a lot of Johnnies backers who coveted Gonzo because they believed he embodied that description, though you won’t hear from any of them this week.

Ten years after Amaker’s vision of a Metro-area turf war to challenge Tobacco Road, you have two teams dangerously close to slipping into irrelevance. Two teams who face critical coaching hires, who must get them right if they are ever going to be prominent players within the cannibalistic trenches of the New Big East.

“These are two programs that thrived when the Big East was a small group of basketball schools,” one prominent basketball insider said yesterday. “But those days are gone, forever. What do St. John’s and Seton Hall have in common with West Virginia and Louisville? You think it’s a coincidence why those two are where they are, why Providence and DePaul are where they are?”

That isn’t to say it’s hopeless, certainly not at St. John’s, which has the power of New York City behind it, nor at Seton Hall, which should be able to use Jersey’s basketball-rich Catholic and urban high schools as its own buffet table. But neither can afford the series of missteps they have encountered in their most recent series of hires.

You can rip Gonzalez all you want, but he was just the latest in a series of Seton Hall hires that either made little sense or were made with little regard to fit. And though Norm Roberts was a wonderful ambassador at a time when St. John’s needed to repair its image (much like Louis Orr was at Seton Hall), the Red Storm have had a matching list of uninspired or unfulfilling choices (Fran Fraschilla = Gonzo; Amaker = Jarvis; Brian Mahoney = George Blaney).

Both likely will target the same pool of candidates. Both will talk about spending big money in a recession. Neither is likely to land a huge fish like Billy Donovan. And so both will tip-toe through the nebulous list of top assistants and established mid-major head coaches, the crapshoot of college sports.

Can they ever attain what Tommy Amaker dreamed about 10 short — or long, depending on your viewpoint — years ago? History tells us we will be lucky if one of them does. Let alone both someday delivering us that kind of special.